’Tis the season to be quitting, it seems. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigned when it became clear he had known about child sexual abuse in his church for years and had done nothing about it. The Guardian newspaper has just quit the-platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter. And a US-based editor, Alex DiFrancesco, has resigned from her post in the Hachette publishing group over its decision to launch a right-wing imprint closely linked to Project 2025.
Like most of us, I admire a principled resignation, especially when it comes at a cost to the resigner. However, too many use a cloak of virtue to disguise what is actually no more noble than a forced or self-interested decision.
I started thinking about this weeks ago as I prepared to not-quite-quit Twitter (I can’t bare to call it X. I won’t close the account and may broadcast occasional updates, but I’m not engaging anymore.) As I thought about how I might explain this, I realised there is a well-worn, simple template used by righteous quitters time and again. It goes like this, with “woteva” standing for whatever the person is quitting:
“When I [started/joined] woteva, it [was/had the potential to be] a great thing involving many great people. However, over time, that positive vision has become degraded and now I can no longer stand by what woteva stands for.”
This statement is typically fleshed out by more information supporting the premises that the original decision to join was good and principled but why woteva has since gone to pot. This basic rationale is used to explain resignations from social media platforms, academia, political parties, NGOs, professional associations and so on. I don’t think that such statements typically contain falsehoods. It’s just that more often than not, they gloss over more awkward realities.
Take my own withdrawal from Twitter. The broad gist of my reasons for leaving can be captured using the template. But the truth is that these reasons were just or almost as good a year ago. Why now? The reason has nothing to do with virtue. Like most twitter-quitters, I hung on all the while the benefits of staying and holding my nose seemed better than the costs of leaving. Many people who left early made different calculations, as do those who still hang on in there. Principles and values are of course among the reasons why people eventually go. But naked self-interest and convenience play a part that righteous resignation statements don’t capture.
The same is true of many other splitters. If you quit academia after many years because you finally have your mortgage paid off, a good alternative source of income and/or a wealthy family, please don’t tell me how your choice was motivated by despair at the decline in academic values without admitting that you would never have left it you didn’t have a comfortable exit route, and that you were perfectly happy to put up with all you now grumble about when you wanted the pay cheque. If you quit a political party because it no longer represents what you stand for, have the decency to admit that you stuck with it for a long time when those changes were already evident.
Too often quitters present themselves as though they were nobly falling on their swords when really they are just jumping to a happier ship or having a sword thrust into them against their will. This is also true of many resignations in which people like to present themselves as nobly taking responsibility for their actions. Take the resignation of Justin Welby. There is little to admire in his exiting stage left, since he left it far too long to accept any blame and only went when his position became untenable.
We should be clearer that quitting is not always a virtuous and praiseworthy choice even when it is the right choice. We often just don’t know whether the quitter is acting out of noble duty or self-defence. For example, I have no idea whether DiFrancesco’s resignation is a canny career move, a principled stand against the MAGA tendency, or both. Often, we’d do better to simply praise the decision without lauding the decider, accepting that we cannot see into their souls.
There is perhaps a broader point here. The true motivations and calculations of human beings are often hidden, even from ourselves. But we have a strong desire to identify the virtuous and wicked, the principled and the pragmatic, and we often can’t help ourselves jumping to conclusions about character on the basis of a couple of notable actions. We should be concerned about character, but because it is often opaque, we would usually do better to focus on deeds. We should be much quicker to praise and blame people for what they do, rather than what we think they are.
News
I have just finished a mini-tour of Scotland’s central belt, trying to drum up interest in my new book, How the World Eats. Audience reactions have been extremely positive so far. It is always difficult for a book that is not by an A-List author to cut through so if this one is to do do, it’ll be a long game. As yet, there has been just one review, a good but dry one in the Irish Times (paywall alert). Word of mouth helps, so if you have read it and like it, tell all your friends. If you have read it and don’t like it, tell me!
For the FT, I have written a long piece about election anxiety and the role of emotion in politics. I hope it gets us beyond the simple narrative of despair that the electorate has lost its heads and is just going with its gut.
For the Wall Street Journal, I reviewed Patchen Barss’s absorbing biography of Nobel Proze winning physicist Roger Penrose, The Impossible Man. It might be interesting to read this alongside my review last year of David Edmond’s brilliant biography of philosopher Derek Parfit. Genius, it seems, often comes at a price, intellectual as well as personal.
You may have heard that Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital. I hosted a philosophy salon with Harvey and Joanna Kavenna earlier this year in which we talked about philosophy and fiction. As I said at the time in a newsletter in part inspired by the event, I thought Orbital was extraordinary and thoroughly recommend that you read it. Harvey’s win has probably brought forward the day when I edit the recording of the event and put it out as a podcast.